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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • Linux, MacOS and Windows have been completely rewritten multiple times across their existence.

    So it’s not like the original decisions are all still in play.

    Windows and Mac OS were rewritten under some particular weird duresses of closed source profit driven engineering; so it has been a mix of improvements and seemingly illogical setbacks.

    Linux developers still need to eat, so some of the same (corporate) influences are there.

    But the average engineer who sets out to create a brand new completely modern operating system - usually decides to reuse any components of Linux that they don’t have any concerns with…

    Which usually gives us yet another cool new Linux variant.

    But sometimes we get…

    something very different

    A cool new FreeBSD variant!






  • Amazon spent around 20 billion dollars cornering every conceivable market, and then successfully made all that money and more back by becoming the default online store for a huge number of people.

    Investors want to recreate that unprecedented return on their investment.

    But since Amazon already sells every real worthwhile product… remaining untapped markets included only new products of questionable worth.

    Of the available new questionable products, AI is a really interesting one.

    Now these investors have spent over $200 billion. And they have promised all that money back and much more.

    Getting their investment back is important enough to these powerful influential investors that whether you or I actually want or need AI does not matter, to them.

    These investors will strong arm everyone they have influence over until either they make their money back or they go broke.




  • I tolerate continued existence out of a morbid sense of curiosity.

    That’s beautiful, in it’s own way.

    I felt that way at one point. It led me, eventually, to moments that I later decided mattered very much, to me.

    If I hadn’t had that morbid curiosity, I’m not sure I would have made it to those moments I now cherish.

    Here’s to morbid curiosity!





  • I hate investing

    Mutual Funds / Index funds are your best bet. (Look for descriptive words like “broad”, “mix” or “full market” in the description).

    If you can, pick out one named “target retirement YYYY” with YYYY being within a few years of whatever year you will turn 67.

    It will automatically follow investing best practices based on your current age - agrressive earlier, and very cautious later.

    I’m not familiar with all the details of how it works

    Perfect recipe to get ripped off. (Most people I know say that insurance/investment combined products suck. I’ve heard some disagreement whether they’re just a bad deal, or such a bad deal they ought to be a crime.)


  • I can’t prove anything, but:

    • There’s evidence that billionaires are taking much more than they earn, and that we (everyone else) would be dramatically better off without them (whether we tax them away or… Come to some other compromise.)
    • Billionaires own most media outlets and social media sites, even those these don’t actually make much money compared to everything else the billionaires own. This makes some people ask why they bother…
    • There’s a noticable tendency in billionaire owned media to focus daily on divisive topics. The specific topic changes, but the divisiveness continues.
    • There is history of powerful authoritarians investing heavily in divisive propaganda, primarily to break apart and distract groups of people who could overthrow them.

    What I have laid out is not proof that today’s billionaires are directing their staff to verbally attack minorites at any opportunity.

    But it certainly is something to think about next time a vicious rumor about a minority group comes along.

    Edit: Yes. I do understand that neither men nor women are minorities. But there’s still enough differences to allow pushing a divisive narrative, which I suspect is enough reason for certain motivated people.

    And to the “could just be a shitty set of incentives” argument. Fair enough. It could be. It’s highly suspicious, but it could be.